Ralph Cicerone, President of NAS, personally reviewed Hansen’s recent article, which is available for free at the PNAS website here.
George Denton, a very distinguished paleoclimatologist of the older school – one whose work will undoubtedly long survive that of the Team, recently contributed an article entitled Holocene elephant seal distribution implies warmer-than-present climate in the Ross Sea”. The period in question was 1100-2300 BP. Unlike the Hansen article, the article here is not publicly accessible without purchase. Abstract for Hall et al:
We show that southern elephant seal (Mirounga leonina) colonies existed proximate to the Ross Ice Shelf during the Holocene, well south of their core sub-Antarctic breeding and molting grounds. We propose that this was due to warming (including a previously unrecognized period from 1,100 to 2,300 14C yr B.P.) that decreased coastal sea ice and allowed penetration of warmer-than-present climate conditions into the Ross Embayment. If, as proposed in the literature, the ice shelf survived this period, it would have been exposed to environments substantially warmer than present.
Climate Audit 
22 Comments
Steve, I think the links are backwards.
I’ve swapped them around.
Steve, text and PDF versions of the article are available for free via the menu links to the right of the abstract.
I can’t pull down the elephant seal article.
Steve, it must be a problem with the Interweb tubes in Canada 🙂 The PDF file is 1.5MB – I can e-mail it to you if you wish.
1100 y BP corresponds to the warming trend exhibited in the Cook et al. (2004) reconstruction, from AD 910-990. This is a warming trend that is both steeper and longer than the current trend (the one formerly described as “unprecedented”).
Marshall, your links are mistyped: you have h t t p : / / h t t p / /
You should remove the redundant second h t t p / / (spaces inserted to prevent the text being turned into links by misguided browsers.)
But when I fix them, it’s still subscription-only.
Bender, I’m sure I could dig it out, but if it’s not too much trouble could you link to information about the Cook 2004 reconstruction you mention? Thanks.
Re #7 For a brief discussion of Cook et al. (2004), see:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=586
The big picture.
Hanson (of NASA we put men on the moon)still can’t seem to manage to get all the lines showing temperature change to start at zero
Even so both the lines for actual temperature come out at or below zero emission model prediction.
What a k**z.
Cicerone showed at the Wegman hearings that he was nothing more than a time served electrician
Link to big pictur
According to Wikipedia the Roman Period starts in 510BC (start of the Roman Republic) and ends in 476AD (end of the Roman Empire).
Those dates correspond to 2516 years BP through 1530 years BP. The theorized warm period of 2300 BP to 1100 BP has significant overlap.
Could this be more evidence for a Roman Warm Period?
Oops, sorry about that. I’m in S. Africa – maybe the article fee is only applicable to certain countries.
Here’s the PNAS’ page charge policy which explains open access. The only bias PNAS appears to have is a monetary one. And actually I find the fact the articles are all free after 6 months very generous compared to other journals.
http://www.pnas.org/misc/iforc.shtml#policies
Hansen’s article is not 6 months old and it is open access. Science put the Wahl et al criticisim of von Storch and Zorita on open access, but left the original article on pay per view.
Re #14:
That’s why I assume Hansen et al. paid the extra $750 to have their article to be open access from the date of publication. Hence, my statement that PNAS’ only bias is monetary.
Maybe it is OK for Cicerone to referee Hansen’s article if he retains his anonymity but I think it is wrong for him to make it known that he is the referee. He has become the publicist for the paper.
Re#14 and the Science articles:
I had to wait until I could get home to check the Science access issues since while I’m at work I have institutional access. From my home computer, the original von Storch article is closed access and both technical comments are open. This appears to be in keeping with Science’s access policy (http://www.sciencemag.org/about/access.dtl). So, again, I don’t see any overt bias on the part of the journals.
Nonetheless, I sympathize your frustration with access issues. In an ideal world, all science articles would be open access.
Jared, I’m not taking issue with open or closed access, but with what seems to be selectively open access. I don’t see anything in the Science policy which would call for the Comment to be open access and the original article closed access. Equally I don’t see anything in PNAS policy that would call for Hansen’s article to be open access and the elephant seal article closed access. It’s not something that I’ve researched – it’s just something that seems that way.
Steve, I don’t want to beat a dead horse or be unduly argumentative but let me try to explicitly spell it out. In PNAS’ policy (quoted in #13):
Hence, it would appear that Hansen et al. paid this sum and Denton et al. did not. Hence, no overt bias beyond a monetary one.
Regarding the Science papers(linked in #17):
Hence, the comments are free and the original article is not. Seems kind of goofy to me (the comments are pretty useless if you can’t read the original article) but it appears consistent and unbiased.
I’m glad to see you pushing for more transparency in the scientific process (I think it’s needed) but I just wanted to let you in this case that there doesn’t seem to be anything shady going on.
#19. OK, I see what you mean. Thanks.
If anyone wants a copy of the the pdf – I have it.
16: Roger Bell,
PNAS works differently from most scientific journals. It publishes papers submitted by members of the National Academy. If that paper is by someone other than the submitter (ie by someone not a member of the academy), the member/submitter is assumed to have acted as referee. If the paper is by a member of the academy and he is submitting his own paper, is is normal, perhaps even customary, to have someone else review the paper for that member, and to acknowledge that reviewer for hsi effort. what this does is force that reviewer to place a bit of his own credibility on the line with the submitted paper.
That is far from “becom[ing] the publicist.”
If you want to publish in PNAS rebutting Hansen, all you have to do is find a member of the academy who thinks your paper is important enough to apply his yearly publication quota to getting it published, and accurate enough to associate his name with it as submitter.